st borrow that of my neighbors, yet the works of the
garden and orchard at this season are fascinating, and will eat up
days and weeks; and a brave scholar should shun it like gambling,
and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious
enchantments. For the present I stay in the new orchard."

In due time came the little troop of children, to gladden the home and
to be a perpetual wonder and delight to the father. In his essay on
"Domestic Life" he thus talks of the little one:--

"The size of the nestler is comic, and its tiny beseeching weakness
is compensated perfectly by the happy, patronizing look of the
mother, who is a sort of high reposing Providence toward it.
Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his
weakness,--his little arms more irresistible than the soldier's,
his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in
manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his
voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child, soften all
hearts to pity and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. His
ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins
more bewitching than any virtue."

Emerson was never a rich man, and his home was always so ordered as to
come within the scope of his limited income; but it was always
attractive and charming, and pervaded by an air of dignity and repose.
And that in it he could dispense hospitality in the old royal manner is
shown by the many times he invites Carlyle to come and spend a year with
him, and seriously urges him to do so. Thoreau availed himself of such
invitation, and spent months at a time in Emerson's home. One wonders if
Mrs. Emerson received such instruction as her husband gives in the essay
just mentioned, and if she profited by it:--

"I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get
a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our
gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. These
things, if they are curious in, they can get for a dollar at any
village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your
accent and behavior, read your heart and earnestness, your thought
and will,--which he cannot buy at any price in any village or city,
and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely and
sleep hard, in order to behold. Cert